DECAYCAST Reviews: RICHARD GUMBY “mem’ree coil” Cassette (Crass Lips Records, 2017)

Big boatload of tapes  just arrived  from Crass Lips Records, Miami based  home  imprint cranking out dozens of releases monthly operating mainly outside of the mainstream bore patterns of music industry hogshit. There’s a plethora of noise, experimental, punk, lo fi pop , garage et al plastered throughout the labels discography, which you can take a peek at here at their bandcamp . 

The casuality the  label takes is a refreshing return to almost a tape  trading  aesthetic where  inserts don’t really  fit, home xeroxed art  crammed into recycled cases, but the music is the message,not the medium. In an era where everything is  deluxe this and that, it’s nice to see a label taking a more primitive  approach. The Richard Gumby  cassette  which arrived, which I believe to be self  titled  covers  thirty or so minutes of  mangled, floating, ballooning deconstructed pop music blending spoken word, home brewed collage and  sampling techniques between fuzzy, whined vocals not so far off  from a natural blending of pre Spacemen 3  outtakes, early John Dwyer era pop punk, and even a  country-ish influenced ballad to boot, which could easily spark the interest of an early Silver Jews fan or two, on Richard Gumby, even within a certain song, a number of  artistic pop styles are buzzed through almost like primitive radio scanning needle techniques  at times even at a near feverish pace, and the fidelity and pacing lend the listener ‘a chair in the room at the end of the hall’- style voyeuristic  approach to this quaint, lush, mangled and warped pop songs. For a short tape, Gumby covers a wide range of  vocal and  instrumentation styles oscillation between lush, dreamy pop and  broken whirring  slightly out of  key music boxes,  tastefully used percussion and  synth, with even some noise/glitch  sections to boot, with a surprise double bass break down  with chopped/screamed vocals and  some pretty intense screams to boot for an album that boasts mostly pop offerings  Honestly, sort of a  hard to classify release, check it out for yourself here. Weird  stuff. We  can say for sure  haven’t heard much like it. Check the  track, “Simon Said”